For several months I’ve been reporting on the travails of parking operations in the City of St. Louis under Treasurer Layne—from millions of dollars in uncollected parking fees to abandoned cars lingering on city streets for months to Layne forgiving his own parking tickets and gifting a girlfriend with a parking hang tag.
But throughout all that reporting, there’s one question that I haven’t been able to answer—that no one seems able to answer—and that I can’t get out of my head.
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Why are there so many long-abandoned cars in the city-owned parking garage at Seventh and Pine?
You only have to be in the Central Downtown Garage for a few minutes before you start to notice the thick coats of dust on a Mustang, a minivan, a Chevy Impala. Passersby have etched bawdy messages in the dust: I’m a dirty girl. Dick was here 6-8-25.
There’s a Honda minivan with one of those stick figure family decals on the back window and license plates that expired 2023. How did it come to park on the garage’s 6th level and then just sit there for what could be months, if not years, judging by the accumulated dust? Or what about the plate-less Mercedes that, according to a sticker slapped on its window, had 48 hours to be moved out of New Town St. Charles in November 2025? How did it wind up in this garage having not moved for at least two months? Or what about the yellow Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz that’s been in the garage for over four years? A photo taken in April 2022 shows it in pretty good condition. Since then, its color has gone from bright egg yolk to dingy eggnog. Who knew time would be so cruel to a Caddy just sitting there parked motionless.
Then there’s a red Mustang, which has been stationary since at least June 2025. City records show it parking illegally around town throughout 2021 and 2023, in South City, Forest Park Southeast, and the Grove. Its most recent ticket was written in January 2023. At some point after that, someone drove it to this garage, parked it on the third level and then locked it up like a bicycle, using a long leash. The cord runs through all four tires, over the top, and under the bottom of the car, with a padlock securing the whole apparatus below the passenger side door. Whoever left that car there clearly wasn’t coming back any time soon.
I got interested in the Pine Street parking garage because it is owned and operated by the Treasurer’s Office and, around the time I first checked it out, Layne was lobbying the Board of Aldermen to approve his purchase of a parking lot in Midtown for $3.4 million. Layne said that he hoped to be able to eventually develop the property, which got me wondering how developments in the Treasurer’s current portfolio were faring. That brought me to the Central Downtown Garage, a 10-level garage with commercial storefronts at ground level. It’s across the street from the Hotel St. Louis and caddy corner to the infamously troubled Railway Exchange.
The Treasurer’s Office owns and operates other parking garages downtown, including one on Tucker Street across from City Hall and the Cupples Street Garage not far from Busch Stadium. Neither has any abandoned cars. A tipster told me that a nearby privately owned lot had years ago been clogged with abandoned cars because tow trucks couldn’t fit inside. But when I took a look for myself I spotted only two that looked possibly abandoned. Whatever’s going on at the Central Downtown Garage seems to be unique to it.
Layne isn’t talking; I sent his spokesperson three emails beginning a full week ago, but the only response from his office was messages saying I would eventually hear back. I did not.
The Treasurer’s Office did recently resume booting and towing abandoned cars. That move followed reporting from SLM and KSDK about the cars being allowed to rack up tens of thousands of dollars in unpaid parking tickets without repercussions. Like a lot of things in St. Louis, towing has bureaucratic layers. Layne’s office handles booting and immobilizing the cars. The City Towing Division, which answers to the mayor, is the one to tow the vehicles to the city tow lot. The two entities drafted up an MOU. The mayor’s side signed it. The Treasurer’s Office still hasn’t. But nonetheless, cars are getting booted and towed.
“The number of cars that are booted and towed is significant,” says Les Sterman, a downtown resident and one of the loudest voices calling for better parking enforcement in his neighborhood. “On my block, three cars owing thousands of dollars in fines were booted and towed in one day. I don’t notice abandoned cars anymore.”
To Sterman’s point, booting and towing has become so common that anyone who spends any time downtown during the day is likely to happen upon it. A few weeks ago, I watched as a woman tried to bang the boot off her wheel with one of those anti-theft clubs. (Her car owed $3,170 in tickets.) The cops were called. After almost a decade of the city not booting cars, the resumption has come as a shock to some.
City Hall spokesman Rasmus Jorgensen says that in March and April, the Towing Division towed about 230 cars from downtown streets. In a presentation to the Board of Aldermen’s Budget Committee last week, Layne said that projected revenue from the boots should shoot up 485 percent.
Some believe there’s more work to be done. “We still have too many abandoned vehicles,” says Ben Jonsson, the city’s chief operating officer and a retired Air Force colonel. He notes that the city is actively looking to increase its towing capacity by expanding the city tow lot, where the vehicles wind up after getting towed.
Asked about the abandoned cars in the Central Downtown Garage, Jonsson said that they were on the city’s radar but that they are a much lower priority than getting derelict cars off city streets. For one, an abandoned car in a garage isn’t a public nuisance in the way that it would be rusting away in front of a business. Also, the garage belongs to the Treasurer’s Office, and the Towing Division is going to prioritize the abandoned cars parked in places they have a direct responsibility over, such as city streets. Jonsson also notes that getting a tow truck into and towing a car out of a garage can also be logistically challenging.
Asked what his best guess is as to how someone parked a seemingly operable car in a garage only to leave it there for months, if not years, Jonsson noted that his job working for the city has at times presented him with questions that even decades in the military did not equip him to answer. This was one of those.
I asked other people for their theories as to how these ten or so cars came to be abandoned at the Central Downtown Garage. Numerous people suggested that maybe the city was using it as an auxiliary tow lot. (Not true, says Jonsson.) Others suggested the cars were stolen and left there. I offered to send plate info to St. Louis Police, but a spokesman said they wouldn’t be able to tell me if any had been reported stolen. Denis Beganovic, who knows downtown as well as anyone, suggested the cars could belong to residents of the Arcade Building, who are primarily artists and might struggle financially, which can make fixing a broken car difficult. Another reporter told me she thinks that the drivers got picked up by ICE.
Hear more about this story from Krull on The 314 Podcast.
Amy Gill is the executive vice president of Restoration St. Louis, which operates the Hotel St. Louis across the street from the Central Downtown Garage. She too has no idea what’s behind the long-idle vehicles, though she does feel like privately-owned garages do a better job handling abandoned cars.
Gill has had a somewhat tortured relationship with the Parking Division under city treasurers going back decades. In the early 2000s, her company used to operate the Coronado building near Saint Louis University. They had a game room with big-screen TVs and billiards on the first floor, a unique perk in a residential building in St. Louis back then. She says that management noticed non-residents availing themselves of the entertainment and dozing on the couches. “It was the parking people just hanging out,” she says. “They were literally down there four or five, six hours a day.”
She says that the managers at the Parking Division were skeptical until she showed them the security camera footage. “I pull up my cameras, and I go, ‘Well, here’s somebody sleeping right now, and two guys playing pool–do they work for you?’ And they look at each other, and they’re like, ‘Yeah,’” she recalls.
Gill brings up that anecdote as a way to show she is sympathetic to the current treasurer, Layne. She understands it’s not easy to manage a workforce that is spread out across the entire city.
But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t have her issues with him.
She says the Hotel St. Louis had to stop contracting with the Central Downtown Garage because during COVID the garage didn’t operate between 10 p.m. and 8 a.m. “You can’t have a hotel guest and tell them, ‘I’m sorry, you can’t leave until eight o’clock because your car is trapped,’” she says. The hotel now contracts with a different, privately owned garage that is less conveniently located. (The Central Downtown Garage now operates 24 hours a day.)
More recently, Gill sought to get in touch with Layne to discuss the fact that the real estate on the ground floor of the parking garage across from her hotel had emptied out. She told SLM that she thought that because the space is owned by the Treasurer’s Office, rather than a private landlord, there ought to be an innovative way to land more tenants. “Something, anything, to get people downtown, give them a really good deal so that you can enliven these neighborhoods,” she said. She noted that even if the rent is a loss leader for the Treasurer’s Office, if the businesses are successful they can make some of that money back with more people paying to park in the garage. When she finally got to talk to Layne about this, she says, the conversation was cordial but not particularly productive.
To Gill’s point, as a commercial real estate operation, the garage seems to be doing only so-so. There is a shop that sells blunt wraps and cell phones. There is the Red Door Chinese Eatery, which serves up standard St. Louis Chinese fare like St. Paul sandwiches, a physical therapist, and an office for the Parking Violations Bureau. That’s it. At least half of the square footage is vacant, much of it running along the city’s newly bikeable and walkable Seventh Street, connecting Ballpark Village and America’s Center.
And, of course, empty commercial real estate on the ground floor doesn’t shed any light on the mystery of the abandoned cars above.
I first went to the Central Downtown Garage in early March and photographed about half of the 10 or so cars that looked abandoned. In early May, after I reached out to Layne’s office seeking comment, I confirmed that the vehicles hadn’t moved an inch. With one exception—a white Honda Odyssey that had vanished—they hadn’t. (Tantalizingly, that Odyssey shows that someone is capable of removing problem cars from the garage if they are sufficiently motivated.)
Also, someone—and, based on the timing, I suspect it’s someone from Layne’s office—had marked many of the cars that looked abandoned by writing 5-1-26 in the dust. I guess I’m not the only one who has taken an interest in these jalopies.
Whoever you are, let me know what you find out.
Also, I have one more for you to look into.
For more than three months now, a pristine condition red Nissan Titan truck has been sitting abandoned in the parking lot adjacent to City Hall, a lot also operated by the Treasurer’s Office. It looks as if its owner drove it off a dealer’s lot in Birmingham directly to 1200 Market Street and just left it there.
It’s been in the same spot since February 7 when it was ticketed for not paying the fee for overflow event parking at the Enterprise Center the night prior. After parking across the street from Enterprise, this driver seems to have disappeared. At the very least they never made it back to their truck.
Playing that night at the arena? Disney on Ice presents Mickey’s Search Party.
Hear more about this story from Krull on The 314 Podcast.
